It seems as though people are always struggling with what to do. And we’ve been talking lately about strategies for your fitness success. So, what I’d like to do is just review some of the things that we’ve been talking about and see if we can’t get you up to speed on some of that information and see if we can’t give you some things to do that might help you get closer to your fitness goals.

The very first thing that you have to remember when you are seeking something from your training, is that you must train with a purpose. I think of this as the World View Goal. And what this means is, you have to have an objective in mind and you have to be able to visualize it. You have to see it in your future. You have to see yourself becoming that which you already are not. And when you do this, what you do is you create an automatic system of decision making that guides your decisions day in, day out.

Without a doubt, fitness is one of the most difficult things in the world. If it were easy, everybody would be fit. We would live in a nation of super fit people. Everybody would run to work. Everybody would lift weights for their job. It would be an unbelievable country, but it’s not.

Because fitness is hard.

So when you set your objective, you create an automatic system by which you make your decisions and frequently, the decisions are between going towards pain or away from pain. And what I mean by that, is that as human beings, we seek comfort. We seek the comfort of a routine. We seek the comfort of our own bed. We seek the comfort of food that tastes good. And we try to avoid pain in our bodies.

Soreness, discomfort, stress…

We try to avoid all forms of discomfort including the immediate discomfort of working out. Working out is hard. There is no two ways about it. If working out is easy for you, you’re not really working out. You must be working out and pushing at the edges of your comfort zone in order to achieve almost any objective. Whether you need to lose a hundred pounds, whether you want to gain five pounds of muscle, whether you want to lose two percent body fat. Chances are in order to do that, you’re going to have to move into pain. And this is not something that you need to shy away from. This is something that you need to embrace.

There are two kinds of pain. There’s the pain that you should really pay attention to and it means stop what you’re doing. This tends to be sharp, shooting pain. This tends to be pain you feel in your joints. This tends to be electric shock type pain that comes with certain types of movement.

Obviously, you want to avoid those types of pain. But the pain that is the anguish of working out, the difficulty, the tightness in your chest, the soreness in your muscles, that’s the kind of pain that you want to move towards. And moving towards that kind of pain typically means that you have a really clear objective in your mind. And that objective needs to be so strong and massaged so often…. You need to think about it every day.

When you daydream at work, you need to daydream about your ideal body.

When you’re on your way to the gym you need to remember and focus on how amazing you’re going to look. How beautiful you’re going to feel. How confident, how strong, how much endurance that you’re going to have. And this is of such utmost importance, because not only does it guide your decision making process, but it also creates an analgesic.

It creates a pain reliever.

When you’re clear, crystal clear in your mind about what you want, getting there is easy. It’s no problem. You just get out there and do it. And then you begin to enjoy the pain, the anguish of working out. Then you begin to enjoy the difficulty of training. The difficulty essentially becomes transformed into an enjoyable challenge.

Does our collective memory go back as far as Apolo Anton Ohno, the short track speed skater from the Winter Olympics?

Can we even go back as far as the Winter Olympics of ’02?

When he competed in 2002, he was the start up, he had that little soul patch, you know he’s this young guy and he did really well, he was the hopeful, and everybody just seemed to swarm around him. I didn’t realize he had created such a media stir until they were showing clips of what his life after the 2002 Olympics was like.

Here he is in a suit and tie. He’s looks the best. He’s out there and he’s got endorsement deals. He’s meeting celebrities, he’s on red carpets…and what this was for him was really, really attractive and incredibly exciting. You know, going on the Jay Leno Show and this kind of thing. Really fabulous.

And you could tell he was really, really enjoying it up to a certain point.

But what happened was, he made a decision. He decided that what was the most important thing for him to do, the clearest objective he could accomplish in his mind was a repeat performance at the next Olympics.

Four years is an incredibly long time, especially from a training perspective. It could be easy for anyone to lose perspective. But if you want to be the best in the world, then four years is what you need to accomplish that objective.

So there was a period there where he could’ve rested on his laurels. He could’ve said, ‘That’s enough. A gold metal winner. That’s plenty. That’s more than most people accomplish in their lifetime.’ But he did something remarkable. He chose to push all of that aside and focus on the objective: Repeat Performance.

By making that decision, by making his objective that much clearer, that personal, that intense, it created an automatic system of decision making.

And at that point it became a no brainer: “Install myself at the training center and do nothing but train until the next Olympics.”

I’ve seen his training footage…it’s like dormitory living at the Olympic training center. It’s not luxurious living. When those first Olympics were over he could’ve taken more endorsement deals and try to spin that celebrity thing into something, you know, making appearances and speaking engagements and this sort of thing and really try and cash in, but that’s not what he did.

What he did was he decided to train.

And he decided to train in such a way that would wilt most of us. We would fail miserably. We just wouldn’t have the mental stamina. The mental intensity to be able to accomplish that kind of objective.

But he did it.

And it was one of the most powerful movements I’ve seen in athletics in I don’t know how long. I don’t know if you remember, but when he got to the 2006 Winter Olympics he was unable to repeat a gold medal performance in the 1500m event but he did take the gold in the 500m race and he went on to collect two more medals making him one of only four Americans who has won three medals in a single Winter Olympics. During the closing ceremony (I will never forget) he talked to a news crew a lot about the spirit of the Olympic Games and about being involved in the spirit of the Olympic Games. You could see the training in his being. You could see it in his eyes. You could see it in the way he talked.

What he spoke about was the purity of training and competition. Of getting to this place where you’re resting on your training background. Where you’ve said, ‘I’ve trained enough. Now it’s time to let the body do the work.’ And he was there. He was there in his complete being, invested in the spirit of the games. Because the spirit of the games themselves wasn’t just getting there and competing. The spirit of the games was the manifestation, the reflection of all those years of training. Years of training! Six days a week, every day, twice a day some days I’m sure.

It was in the end, a really incredible testament to the power of decision making. All of us can’t be Apolo Anton Ohno but we can take a piece of that and make a priority out of what we want in our bodies and say, ‘I want my body to be this.’ And picture that in our mind and see it happening. And the more you do that, the more it informs your day to day decisions. And you’re going to need those day to day decisions informed, because every day you’re faced with decisions. Should I eat ice-cream or should I have something more nutritious? Should I eat something that’s going to help me towards my goal? Or eat something that’s going to hinder me in my process of obtaining my goal?

You don’t have to always, one hundred percent make it, but if you don’t have a clear objective, then that decision making process is so mushy and so unclear, that chances are more often than not you will be moving away from your goal rather than closer to it.

So, make your goal nice and clear. Make it super clear and that will inform almost the rest of everything you do.

Another thing that you need to work on and make sure that you do is you need to obtain an assessment. You need to get a baseline measurement of where you are. Typically in training we do this by measuring circumference of the limbs, your chest, your waist, your hips. We measure body fat percentage, get basic weight. You don’t have to hire a trainer for everything you do. There are some people who only workout with a trainer. That might not be right for you. But you should absolutely hire a trainer to give you an assessment. And there’s not a single trainer out there in the world that won’t give you an assessment for whatever their hourly fee is. And since an assessment shouldn’t take more than an hour, you can spend the rest of the time asking questions about how you should train based on your assessment.

There’s not a single trainer in any gym that won’t help you in this regard.

Make sure they have good quality measuring equipment and make sure you go back and visit them after you have an understanding of the things that you might need to accomplish.

Now, if you’re in a gym, you need to set up a program that challenges your body’s abilities in all planes of motion to your fullest range of motion. And there are many different ways to train. And they’re all contingent upon what is that you want. If you want to gain muscle mass, you need to be operating at an anabolic state. This means that you’re operating in a caloric surplus. And typically, we speak of this as about five hundred to eight hundred extra calories a day above and beyond which you’re already burning. This creates an anabolic environment and it allows muscles to grow provided you’re training in a manner that allows muscles to grow.

So, let’s take a quick look at some of the different training variables, whether you’re trying to lose weight, gain weight, it doesn’t mater. There’s intensity and there’s endurance. And the way we speak of this in trainer language is, you can go hard or you can go long, but you can’t go hard and long. In other words, you can do a really intense maximal lift, let’s say a dead lift…let’s say, double your body weight dead lift. You can’t do that for five minutes in a row. Your muscles simply won’t take it. They’ll fatigue. If you lower the weight to less than a third of your body weight, you could probably do dead lifts for five or ten minutes straight if you did it at a nice even pace.

That’s a little quick example of the difference between intensity and endurance. And this is also recognized as power and endurance or strength verses stamina. Now, if you want a complete body, depending on your objective, you want to favor one side of that continuum. If you are a triathlete, you want to favor your body’s ability to endure. So most of your training is going to be about endurance. But endurance doesn’t come in and of itself, it also comes with strength.

So you want to be able to train for strength and you want to be able to incorporate that into your training routines so that you have periods of strength development and you have periods of endurance development.

Now, on the other side of the spectrum, if you just want to get bigger muscles and you don’t really care about the cardiovascular component, you want to favor lifting heavier and heavier and heavier weights. This insures that your muscles adapt, your bones adapt, your ligaments, your joints adapt.

When done properly, this means with good form, with good control, you will invariably get bigger muscles by lifting heavier and heavier weights. Now, it’s not always true that you can just lift heavier each and every week and expect to obtain infinite progressive results. You need to be able to vary and modulate your program so that occasionally you’re doing things that are more on the endurance end of the spectrum and certainly, you want to encourage rest periods that allow your body to recover.

Speaking of rest periods, once you’ve got your world view goal, once you’ve got your assessment, once you’ve got an essential understanding of what kind of training you’re going to be doing, you need to be able to manage your recovery.

Managing recovery means you need to have periods of low stress built into your life. Now, as hard as you can train, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s always a good idea to train hard. As hard as you train, means you need to recover with the same kind of intensity and fervor. So, if you go crazy, all out, lifting super heavy weights for one week, you’re probably going to need a week to rest, relax, recover. Each time you workout with intensity you challenge your body. You break down muscle tissue. You challenge the systems by which muscles contract and your body needs time to adapt to that. So you need to recover.

Recovery means no stress.

Sleep is a great way to recover, because you’re not stressed when you’re sleeping providing all things are equal, you know, you have a clean comfortable bed, it’s cool, it’s dark. You have uninterrupted sleep for, you know, six to eight hours. You need to have that regularly. Above and beyond that, you also need to factor in lower periods of life stress. This is why things like mediation and yoga are a real benefit to body builders and athletes. Even people who are just trying to get into better shape. You need to have periods of low stress.

If you have a very high stress job, chances are this is going to make your fitness progress very difficult, because exercise is a form of stress and you need to be able to recover from that stress. I know there’s a lot of travelers out there and I know that if you travel away from your hometown to a different town for business for three days on end, by the time you get home you’re probably pretty well drained emotionally, mentally…you’re fatigued. This is a form of stress. And this type of stress makes it more difficult for your body to recover from exercise stress. So you need to have periods of recovery built into your training program so that you can reap the benefits of training otherwise you’re just going to run your body into the ground. You’ll get sick, you’ll be really crabby, you’ll be tired.

These are all symptoms of over training by the way. If you have a really poor attitude towards working out, you’re dragging yourself to the gym, you don’t want to go, you feel tired, you don’t feel happy, you don’t feel like yourself…these are also examples of adrenal exhaustion. Adrenal exhaustion comes from too much stress. Repeated bouts of intensity. And that can come emotionally from your family. That can come from people at work. That can come from the amount of work that you have to do. That can come from the type and amount of exercise that you do. So you have to be able to manage recovery.

I know it seems like a lot to wrap your brain around, but the more you think about your body and meeting the challenges that make you feel better, stronger, leaner, the more you will feel this purity of training and the personal power it can develop.

After some of my recent posts I heard some feedback about this notion of pushing harder and making exercise more difficult. There is fear there for some people. Who wants to get hurt? None of us do.

But what’s the point of having a body that you aren’t thrilled with? What is the point of having a body that’s like ‘eh, it’s okay.’ Why not have the body of your dreams? It’s certainly the goal that I’ve been in hot pursuit of. It is certainly the reason why I started strengthnation.com. And I believe it is the reason for all of us to come together at a place like this or strengthnation.com and support each other in this effort. I think that attaining the body of your dreams is an honorable and worthwhile goal.

I understand that value is different for each of us. It also means that we have to come to a clearer understanding of what it means to push and how to go about it in a way that produces a result and not an injury.

I got an email recently that was from a man overseas who was having a little bit of trouble, kind of justifying what it meant to be intense. So we need to define intensity and define what that means. So let’s take a look at it from a purely mechanical point of view.

Intensity is referred to as the amount of effort in a given situation. Let’s call it a given lift. So, if we take for example, a bench press. Now, I can’t say do an intense bench press at one hundred pounds, because for some people that might not be very intense and for others, that might be so intense it’s impossible to even press it once.

So what intensity is a measure of, is typically a measure of your one repetition maximum. Your one repetition maximum for any given lift, is the most amount of weight you can successfully, with good form, lift for one repetition, not two. And that’s a big distinction. People have written a lot about intensity over the years. Mike Mentzer was famous for his one set protocol. And if you listen to the interview I did with Fred Hahn the author of Slow Burn on strengthnation.com you will hear how he promotes super slow training, which is the most amount of weight you can lift for more than sixty seconds, but less than ninety seconds. Doing very slow, very controlled repetitions. Perhaps one or two repetitions per set.

The theory behind it is that intensity is the trigger. Intensity is the trigger that tells your body whether or not to build muscle. And what we’re all trying to do when we go to the gym to lift weights is build muscle. Some people are trying to build enormous amounts of muscle. Some people are just trying to do enough weight lifting to stimulate muscle tissue to stick around, so that when they do their cardio and their diet and they’re losing weight, they’re not losing muscle, they’re losing fat.

So I’ll review that thought in a second, but I want to make sure we’re clear about intensity. Intensity is a measure of your one repetition maximum. So, if you can complete one repetition of a given weight, but not two, that’s as intense as you can get for that lift.

Some people train for single reps, especially power lifters train, gradually stepping up to a one repetition maximum. So that when they get to a meet or a competition, they can perform their biggest lift ever, their most intense lift ever. That’s part of a very specific training protocol. Most of us don’t need to do one repetition maximums, except when we’re checking in to determine how strong we are. And the reason why we do that is because a quality weight lifting program is going to prescribe repetitions based on a percentage of your one repetition maximum and your desired personal goals.

Body building type endeavors, muscle building type endeavors are typically seventy or seventy-five percent of your one repetition maximum. And you can usually do about twelve repetitions based on that number. And when I say twelve repetitions, I mean twelve, but not thirteen. So that’s a measure of intensity. And the lower that percentage gets, the less intense you are exercising.

So when you are trying to determine intensity for yourself, the most important thing to remember, is to perform with good form…in control. It doesn’t count if it’s bad form. It doesn’t count if you have to kick and scream and blah, blah, blah to get a second repetition or to even get your one repetition.

Your intensity level is an expression of your ability in its strictest form. For you, that might mean one single pushup from your toes. Touch your chin to the floor, nothing else touches and you press back up. Smooth and steady. You can’t do it twice. That could be your most intense effort. We all have a most intense effort, a personal best and that is going to be true for each and every one of us. That’s the grand unifying theory of weight lifting. Everybody has their own benchmark that they’re trying to lift against. That they’re trying to do better than. That they’re trying to achieve. It’s true for you, it’s true for me.

Typically, it’s measured in terms of body weight. If you can bench press your body weight, if you can bench press one and a half times your body weight, you are an incredibly strong individual. If you can squat twice your body weight or more, you are an incredibly strong individual. That is a measure of your intensity. So when I talk about intensity and when I say you have to up the intensity if you want to produce a result, what I’m saying is, you have to find your strictest form. Your best form. You have to find the most effort, the most amount of weight you can lift for that form and your goal. And then base your workouts on that.

And you can test and retest and test and retest depending on where you are in your strength development. But it’s very important that we understand this concept. Intensity is not an objective number (100lbs). It’s a subjective number (10 lbs more than I lifted last week!). It’s an expression of your ability in your strictest form to achieve a single repetition lift. And then you can base your repetitions for other workouts on that.

For example, seventy five percent of your One rep Max is probably going to be a muscle building type workout. If you are new weight lifting what we would do is we would get you in the weight room and say, ‘okay, press this and see how much you can press.’ We would find that one repetition maximum. And then probably start you off at sixty or even fifty percent of that one repetition maximum to develop your body’s ability to adapt to the form and the movement of weight lifting. But if you’re an advanced weight lifter, if you’re used to weight lifting and you’ve been doing this, then you should have an idea of your one repetition maximum for a variety of lifts.

Typically, I say the big three. Dead lifting, squatting and bench pressing. You should know at a given moment how much you can lift for each of those lifts one time. Quick side note…The interesting thing about dead lifting is that your hands might be the weak link in that factor. And your hands might fatigue before your legs, your glutes, your hamstrings, your quads fatigue, and you might actually have more effort in your body, but not enough in your hands to hold the bar. So it’s important to remember that intensity is a reflection of your ability with strict form to successfully complete one lift.

Now, if you are an advanced weight lifter, you can also up the intensity by getting gradually closer to one repetition maximums. So you can spend a few weeks in the hypertrophy phases of lifting at seventy five percent. Then you can step it up to eighty percent. Then you can step it up to ninety percent.

This is all carefully outlined in terms of the workout program for my Rhythm System E-Book which is on strengthnation.com. And it’s spread out over a twelve week period. Gradually getting more and more intense until you’re lifting at roughly ninety five percent of your one repetition maximum. That’s very intense.

Eventually you are going to be attempting these type of intense efforts. Your repetition scheme is probably going to be about two, maybe as much as four. That’s heavy, heavy lifting. And it does produce a result. And it produces a result whether you’re male, whether you’re female, whether you’re young, whether you’re old.

So it’s important to remember that intensity is an expression of your ability with good form. You can’t hurt yourself if you’re using good form. You can hurt yourself if you’re using bad form.

So let’s say you’re, you know, seventy-five years old, you’ve got a bad shoulder, you’ve got a bad knee, you’ve got a bad hip, but there’s things that you can still do within your range of what you can accomplish successfully without pain, is going to measure your intensity level. Does that make sense? I hope it does. And I’m glad it does.

Whatever it is that is the personal best for you is the same energy, intensity and passion that is the same personal best for me even though we’re all different bodies. We all have different body types. We all have different amounts of time and energy we are able to sacrifice in order to achieve that which we want. But in our efforts we are united. In our goals we are united.

And that is truly valuable. I know that over the past few weeks I’ve been talking a lot about goals. I’ve been talking a lot about intensity. We’ve been trying to debrief ourselves and come back from the minor abyss that the holidays may have been and get on a track that is going to produce for us results. All I am trying to do is my best. I am seeking the edge of my ability and attempting to live there. That is all you can do too.

I just wanted to finish with that incomplete thought from above and that is on the subject of lifting in a way that retains muscle while burning fat. When you are dieting specifically to lose weight lifting becomes the pivotal factor upon which your success is determined. It tells the difference between someone who is simply smaller than they were before the diet and someone who looks ripped, defined, toned, healthy and in shape.

You see weight lifting when done properly with a diet and cardio program will help your body retain muscle tissue. In the event of caloric deprivation your body your body will attempt to make up the deficit by converting muscle into fuel for locomotion. this has the unfortunate effect of making you smaller but not less fat. If you want to get that lean, in shape look then the weights will tell your muscles to stick around and afford your body the chance to use its stored fat to make up the caloric deficit making you leaner and more toned.

So throw that idea in with the intensity concept and yuo are well on your way to becoming a leaner, healthier, better looking, better feeling version of your pre holiday self.

So in order to obtain the kind of results that result in a leaner body you’ve to make the adjustments to your diet, the easiest adjustment you could probably make is to insure that you create a fat burning environment. Now, insuring this creation, one of the basics of which is very, very simple is of critical importance and that is blood sugar.

You’ve got to be able to stabilize your blood sugar. And the easiest way to do this is to have regular bouts of feeding. It’s what I call them. Regular meals. Regular intervals in which you take food in and the shorter the interval the better to a degree, it should probably be every three to three and a half hours.

Extreme body builders, guys who spend all day in the gym and do it for a living they’re probably going to eat every two hours. You might be able to get away with eating every four hours, but ideally you want to have food coming into your body every three hours that you’re awake from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep. And I’ve seen conflicting issues about this.

Some people say you can’t eat before you go to bed and lay down and they cite some sort of magic “lying down property” where your body stores more fat if you’re lying down. I haven’t seen any evidence that indicates that this is true. It has to do more with how many calories you take in throughout the day and how much activity you’ve done and whether or not you’ve actually gotten a caloric balance or created a caloric deficit. If you’re interested in losing fat yes, you will have to eat less than your body needs, but the trick to eating less than your body needs is to maintain stable blood sugar by keeping regular intervals of feeding times. Regular meals insures that you have a stable blood sugar level. So you’ve got to account for that. You can’t get up in the morning have a cup of coffee, work for six hours, eat a snack, come home and eat a chicken salad and expect to obtain a fat loss result in a long term.

Yes, it might work short term if you’re not used to that, but your body is an adaptive mechanism and will rapidly acclimate to that type of feeding system and make an adjustment to your metabolism in order to compensate for that. This is going to freeze up your body’s ability to release stored fat.

That’s not what you want to do. Too long of a period in between meals creates an unstable blood sugar environment. You know what a sure sign of an unstable blood sugar environment is? Fantasies, about muffins, brownies, candy and ice cream. If you’re sitting around thinking ‘an ice cream cone would be fantastic right now’, chances are good that you haven’t eaten enough food.

That’s how you know if you’re eating regular meals. It reduces your cravings. It’s very simple, the more often you eat an appropriately divided meal, the less likely it is you’ll have cravings for sugary foods because your blood sugar will be stable. The even meals are outlined in my book The Rhythm System and the Rhythm System is available to members of sttrengthnation.com. It’s an E-book and I’ve recently made a couple revisions to it. Not many, just in the carbohydrate step down program. I’ve made it easier, but by and large the language and the basics are still the same. It describes how you can choose protein, carbohydrate and vegetables and eat them in a rhythmic manner in order to obtain fat loss results.

It’s very, very simple and I’m giving away the whole system just by talking about it here because it’s this system. In fact, the entirety of The Rhythm System is condensed into one idea. It’s as simple as this…eat every three to three and a half hours.

If you’re hungry you should eat. When you eat, eat a lean protein, a green vegetable and a complex carbohydrate. Now, we can get into a little bit of a funny area with the complex carbohydrate so let’s clarify. The less processed your complex carbohydrate the better. Pasta is a processed carbohydrate. So is bread. So are corn chips. So are potato chips. So the more whole it is the better, sweet potato, whole sweet potato better, brown rice are better.

And the trick that I use within the Rhythm System is to insure that the carbohydrate portion is less than the protein portion on your plate. This will insure, that you’re not overeating carbohydrates, which is really the easiest way to sabotage your fat loss program. It is just too easy to eat too many carbohydrates.

Why?

Mostly we underestimate how many carbs we actually need in order function at our best. Call up your favorite nutritionist and ask to be shown a full day’s supply of carbohydrates for someone who is trying to lose fat. The small size of that portion will surprise you. In fact it will remind you of your last meal not to mention a day’s worth of food.

Eating too many carbohydrates or even large meals in general…if you listen to the interview that I did with Dr. Keith Berkowitz he’ll tell you that a large meal in and of itself can produce an insulin response and that is somehting you want to avoid. You want to avoid spikes in pancreatic production of insulin. And the reason why you want to avoid that is because of the relationship insulin has with glucagon.

Too much insulin in your body ultimately prevents the use of fat as a fuel. And that usually has to do with too much simple carbohydrate (sugar) in your diet. So the easy way out is to keep the sugar low by consuming unprocessed complex carbohydrates that are smaller than your lean protein portion.

So and I just said it before, but I want to say it again, if you’re hungry you should eat. When you eat, eat a Rhythm System meal. As I’ve just described it.

This way you should be thinking about your feedings as meals and they should all be roughly the same size as each other. This helps insure stable blood sugar. So don’t think of it so much as a snack. Breakfast snack, lunch snack, dinner snack, think of it more as I’m hungry I should eat. And when you eat find a protein, a lean protein and build around it. Does that make sense?

It really is an excellent system and the key to utilizing this system is determining first of all what foods work for you and what foods don’t. And if you just use this as a base of operations, as a template, then it will reveal itself throughout the course of time which ones are working better than others in terms of whether it’s: ‘I like pork better or beef better, I’m not a beef person I’m a chicken person, oh I can’t eat fish or I can’t eat shellfish’

Whatever it is for you, you just start on a base and you work from there and then build around that. Once you’ve gotten your Rhythm System meals in place you have an interesting option in terms of your exercise. Exercise comes in two forms; anaerobic and aerobic, weight lifting and cardio. Those are your two forms of exercise. And a lot of exercise is actually a combination of both things.

In essence and ultimately the subect of future articles; The main ingredients of your exercise program must include weight lifting and they must include cardiovascular activity. You can separate them by day if you chose or separate them within your workout. One of the questions I am frequently asked is: Should I do my cardio first or weight lifting first?

I always have my clients warm up before we start weight lifting by doing a general five to ten minutes on the treadmill or the elliptical trainer or machine of choice, then we do oour movement preparation program and then we begin our weight lifting.

But one of the key components of getting your body functioning at an optimal level has to do with obviously, with circulation. So one of the things that you have to remember is that if you want your muscles to rebuild you need to fuel them adequately, which means you need to be eating consistently and providing your body with as much protein as it needs in addition to the aforementioned carbohydrates and vegetables, etcetera.

In order to get the protein to the muscle tissue where the muscles will use it to rebuild, your body has got to find those nutrients and deposit them at the muscle cell and it’s going to do this obviously, by circulation of blood. So you can produce an added advantage by favoring cardiovascular activity after your weight training workout. So this means that if you’ve got the time, I know not all of us do, but if you’ve got the time, after you do your weight lifting get your cardio in.

And you don’t want to go crazy on the cardio, but you do want to circulate some blood. This will help insure that as your blood circulates it pulls out waste material and pushes in rebuilding material. This will help you recover faster and recover better. Many people talk about this as a cool down. You could think of it as a cool down. And if you just added ten, twenty minutes of elliptical trainer or treadmill after your weight lifting workouts I guarantee you, you would see an immediate, noticeable difference in your body’s ability to recuperate, your body’s ability to restore damaged muscle tissue and ultimately, your body fat percentage.

So there’s a quick little tip for you. Get on the treadmill, take a bike ride, do a light jog, do a little elliptical trainer after your weight training workout to help insure that the blood circulates and circulating blood helps deposit nutrients and pull away waste material.

The way I would do it is I would take a protein shake, maybe not the whole thing, but I would take some protein drink after my weight training workout, wait a few minutes and then circulate the blood. I wouldn’t try and get a five hundred calorie protein shake in and then try and go for a jog. I’m talking about some light whey protein. I’m talking about a recovery drink. Accelerade is another one, Muscle Milk, Lean Protein by Labrada, Myoplex etc…

If you log on to strengthnation.com you can get How to Hack Your Gatorade, which will tell you how to create a pre-workout drink and a post-workout drink using Gatorade and whey protein. I would take a post-workout drink, about half of it maybe right after my weight training, wait a few minutes and then do a light jog on the treadmill to insure that I’m circulating blood and circulating new, rebuilding nutrients to the muscle cells.

If you want to burn the fat off your belly you need to burn THIS into your brain first.

Eat breakfast. I eat 6 eggwhites with broccoli every day. I take black coffee and a cup of dry cereal to go with it. Even when I am pressed for time I still get breakfast in even if I just fry a couple eggs.

I think the important thing to remember is that I make time for my breakfast. It is that important. It works.

Look, you can make fat loss as difficult as you like. You can make it out to be super complicated if you choose.

But one of the easiest things you can do to start melting the fat off your frame is to start eating a breakfast that boosts your metabolism and sets the tone for fat loss all day long.

Now, there’s a very good chance you’re nodding your head in agreement with me, saying something like, “That’s great. I know that…. But what the heck do I eat?”

Seriously, would that be so hard? Don’t you think you can manage that in the morning?

Well, if you can’t Jayson, who is the Head of R & D at Prograde Nutrition, has another suggestion. You can use a nutritious meal replacement shake like Prograde Lean.

I’ve checked it out and it really has a delicious chocolate flavor. In fact, I know Prograde spent 6 months developing Prograde Lean just to get the taste right.

Ok, so there are 4 options for a Belly Fat Blasting Breakfast. Enjoy!

Yours in health,

Jason

PS – Remember, Prograde Nutrition is currently having a BIG 10.9% off everything January Celebration Sale to celebrate the New Year and the fact they are now shipping to the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

Yes, that’s 10.9 as in January of 2009

Here are some other details I want to make sure you know about:

– Again, you receive 10.9% off all Prograde products.

– It will run from Thursday, January 8th until Thursday, January 15th at 11:59pm EST.

– Yes, that 10.9% off will be applicable to SmartShip orders. But it only applies to that first purchase. Not ongoing.